Deeplinks Blog posts about Computer Fraud And Abuse Act Reform

EFF is at Black Hat and DEF CON this week, two conferences that draw a wide variety of people from tech including security researchers, coders, engineers, and everyday users. This year, EFF is pushing its campaign around making common sense changes to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act—including a phone booth called the CFAA DC Dialer that allows DEF CON attendees to call their Representative.

In January, our friend Aaron Swartz killed himself. Aaron was unable to carry on against an overzealous government prosecution enforcing a grossly unfair and outdated law. We, and millions of others around the world, were saddened beyond words. Aaron was prosecuted for using legendary academic institution Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)’s open network to download articles from JSTOR, the digital library that sells scholarly articles, largely funded by public tax dollars, back to the public at something like $5-12 per article. Academic institutions like MIT, however, don't pay for each article but instead pay subscription fees that give access to everyone within their communities, including visitors like Aaron.

Update/Retraction: Upon further reflection, we have determined that portions of this blog post are not correct. We regret the error and are withdrawing the post in its entirety.

Specifically, the post suggested that Manning was double charged for access to classified material under the CFAA as well as under Section 793(e) of Espionage act. In fact, Manning was charged with two CFAA violations for access to particular sets of material that were not separately charged in the six Espionage act counts.

Bradley Manning was convicted (PDF) on 19 counts today, including charges under the Espionage Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for leaking approximately 700,000 government documents to WikiLeaks. While it was a relief that he was not convicted of the worst charge “aiding the enemy,” the verdict remains deeply troubling and could potentially result in a sentence of life in prison. The sentencing phase starts tomorrow, and a fuller legal opinion from the judge should also come soon.

We will likely have a deeper analysis of the verdict later, but two things stand out as particularly relevant to—and especially frightening for—folks who love the Internet and use digital tools.